Page 27 of The Golden Enclaves
“It doesn’t matter,” I said flatly. “I’m here for Patience.” I pushed myself up. “Let’s go.” Aadhya and Liesel weren’t very enthusiastic about getting up, but they did it. I got ahead of them a little, banging open doors to the language labs, looking inside, banging back out. I was aggressive about it, letting doors slam and crash. The noise didn’t travel properly, but as long as I kept on making it, I could almost fill the heavy muffling air.
Then they caught up to me, and Liesel stopped me opening the next door. “Listen!” she hissed.
We all stood holding our breath, and faintly from down the hall I heard a low murmuring sound, like voices talking on the other side of a wall. I didn’t move for a moment. I’d half been hoping to be attacked, for Patience to come at me roaring and horrible and fast, so fast I could just kill it right away, kill it without hearing anything any of its mouths might have to say to me.
Finally I forced myself back into motion, and we went down the corridor. The murmuring grew louder, still unintelligible but more clearly a single voice speaking, speaking without a pause. I couldn’t understand the words. I stood outside the door another thousand years before I shoved it open and went inside.
It was one of the honors language labs, the small ones with the nice private carrels and the padded headphones. I’d been languages track my entire career, but I’d never been assigned to one of them. Ioughtto have been sure of at least one course in here during my senior year, but instead I’d beenloaded up with four interdisciplinary seminar classes and not a single straightforward language class, and yes I could still feel bitter about it, or at least I tried to still feel bitter, tried to hold on to that nice small feeling of resentment and spite as hard as I could.
The room wasn’t especially large by Scholomance standards. The Patience in my memory would have filled it completely. But the back half was sunk in darkness, and the murmuring was coming from in there. I was tight all through my body as Aadhya sent the glimmerball shooting forward—but the room was still empty. There had been fighting in here at some point: a handful of carrels had been smashed apart, and a set of massive clawed gouges ran in parallel along the ceiling, through the overhead lamps, and down the far wall, like a dragon had been thrashing around wildly. But whatever had done the fighting was gone. The murmuring was coming from the headphones dangling from one of the carrels, repeating a lesson in a language I didn’t know.
Aadhya let out an explosive breath that helped me let go of the one I hadn’t noticed I was holding on to, and we all just stood there a little bit shakily, until Liesel reached out and took the headphones and unplugged them, to stop the endless murmuring noise.
We slogged onwards up to the cafeteria, the wreckage of our last breakfast still left on the tables: no one had bothered to bus their trays. We followed the speakers through the library stacks, a weirdly short walk: sections seemed to have entirely disappeared, and the ones that were left were mostly full of introductory textbooks in rubbishy condition. The books were all slipping off the shelves by the dozens, I suppose, going wherever books of magic hide when they don’t want to be on a shelf. I had an instinctive burst of alarm about the Golden Stone sutras, back home with Mum. I wasn’tpaying enough attention to them, I should have cleaned the cover, I should have told them how wonderful they were—all the habits I’d built over senior year.
And I missed them, with a sharp jab of pain; I missedMum,missedhome,wanted to be there with every atom of my body again, as if coming back into the Scholomance had erased away all the confusion and misery of her revelation, and replaced them with the much larger misery of being inhere,hunting for what was left of Orion, so I could kill him.
We followed our thread through the labyrinth of the library stacks and back down again through the other half of the school. We passed the wreckage of the Maleficaria Studies auditorium: we’d torn the loathed place apart for building supplies at the end of last year, and the damage there had only worsened, the outer walls left gaping. The new freshman dormitory level ought to have been visible on the other side and wasn’t, only pitch-black void there past the handful of skeletal girders still standing. A few partial mals still peered out at us from the walls, but they stayed in the almost-destroyed instructive mural and didn’t come alive the way they’d used to sometimes, in class; they were just flat paintings now.
That was the closest we got to seeing a mal or for that matter anything even moving. “The maw-mouth in London ran from you. It knew you could kill it, even beforeyouknew,” Liesel said as we slogged back down the stairs to the workshop floor. “Patience must be hiding.”
“How can a maw-mouth the size of a barnhide?” Aadhya said.
“Maw-mouths are oozes,” Liesel said. “It could simply spread itself out between two floors.”
We all looked down at our feet with an involuntary flinch, even Liesel. “Except we already hacked up the school all over the place,” Aadhya said after a moment, sounding as if shewas trying to convince herself. “Half the rooms have some floor and ceiling panels missing. We’d have seen it.”
Iwasn’tconvinced; none of us had spotted Patience before graduation, had we? For lack of any better ideas, we went into a classroom and Aadhya took the legs off one of the old metal chairs and reshaped them into pry bars. We started lifting up floor panels as we went and sending the glimmerball inside. It slowed our progress to even more of a crawl. If we were going to do an exhaustive search, we ought to have gone back up and started at the library, but we didn’t, in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going. We couldn’t possibly have done an exhaustive search of the Scholomance anyway. This place had been built to house five thousand wizards. An entire army of maleficaria could have avoided the three of us for years, much less a single mal.
But it shouldn’t have made a difference. We were looking for something that none of us wanted to find. In the Scholomance, that ought to have made it bog-easy. We should have turned a corner and there Patience would be, waiting for us, with Orion’s eyes and mouth staring out at me right at eye level. Half of what made the search agonizing was the certain knowledge that I was going to find exactly what I was looking for. Even if Patience was putting an enormous effort into hiding from us, even a modest effort onourside ought to have won out. Only we kept looking, and we kept not findingit.
“I’ll have to summon it,” I said finally, as we went down the last stairway, back to the workshop level.
“Well, that sounds amazing,” Aadhya said. “How can we have tosummona maw-mouth? That literally sounds like what you’d offer if you were trying to summon somethinggood.Universe, bring me a basket of soma, and in return I’llface the world’s biggest maw-mouth! Maybe you should try it that way.”
“It will not workeitherway,” Liesel said, savagely, and threw her pry bar down with a clang. We both paused and looked at her. “It isn’t here! We would have found it if it were here. It is not in the school.”
“Oh, okay, so now you think it’s worth considering the possibility that itdidget out,” Aadhya said, dropping hers too, and putting her hands on her hips with a glare of outrage.
“No!” Liesel said. “If Patience could get out, the others could get out, too. None of them got out. The school lingers, but the maleficaria are gone. They spent their malia to survive as long as they could, but they dwindled and faded into the void. They are gone, and Patience is gone.”
She said it with the aggressive confidence of someone trying to impose their own truth on the universe, only in this case, I understood at once that she was trying to impose it onme.She didn’t really believe that all the horde and Patience had just quietly gone into the void. She’d only decided that, to her fury, something she didn’t understand in the least had happened to the mals and to Patience, and so we weren’t going to find Patience no matter what we did. And she didn’t want me trying to do a summoning, because she was concerned about what Iwouldoffer, to set Orion free. She was right to be concerned. I’d have to offer enough to break through whatever hideous thing had happened to all the mals, which was presumably even worse than all of them lumped together.
“I’m going to try,” I said flatly, answering what she was really saying. “We’ll go back down to the doors first, and you can both go out before I try it.”
“Don’t be foolish,” Liesel said. “Listen to me—”
“Sorry,” I said, meaningfuck off,and didn’t. I walked awayfrom her down the corridor to the gym, where the other maintenance shaft would be waiting to take us back down to the graduation hall. I knew Patience wouldn’t be there. But I kept prying up floor tiles on the way, and when I got to the big doors, I pried them open, too, and I was right; Patience wasn’t there. Even though half the school had fallen apart, and the rest was threatening to follow, the gym artifice was still running in full form: trees heavy with late-summer fruit and the horribly beautiful smell of perfectly ripe peaches on every breath, a winding stream gurgling over rocks and crossed by a charming little bridge, branches entwined to frame the pagoda building in the distance like a picture.
And Orion was sitting on the porch, looking off into the distance.
I just stood there in the doorway at first. You might think I’d have entertained at least one fantasy, one tiny little dream of finding Orion alive and well and really properly rescuing him, but I hadn’t. The Scholomance trains you out of expecting miracles. The only miracles we ever received were the ones we made ourselves, and we paid for every one in advance. I hadn’t hoped for it at all.
Just about when I’d have screamed my throat raw and run at him, Liesel grabbed my arm with both hands and leaned back with all her weight, which she needed to hold me. Even as I tried to wrestle loose, Aadhya was gripping my other arm to help and putting her hand over my mouth, and Liesel hissed at me, “It’s not him! It’s a trap for you!”
It would have been a jolly good trap, too, and I’d have gone straight into it in a second, only before I could heave them both off, Orion turned his head and saw us. He stood up and came at us through the peach trees.
Liesel and Aadhya both froze into complete stillness, like a prey animal realizing it’s exposed to a hunter in full view. Ifelt it through their hands, still locked on my arms. I felt it in my own shriveling gut. Orion was looking right at me, and I wish ithadbeen a trap, I wish I’d been able to imagine for even a moment that itwasn’thim, but it was. It was him. The real difference was thatIwasn’tme,not in his head. He was looking at me with absolutely nothing but the utterly focused calculation that filled him when he was hunting mals, where the only thing in his head was what he had to do next.
